Efficient person searching in a peer-to-peer network

Internet applications such as voice over IP and instant messaging require the support of efficient person search. In these applications, a user often has a list of people whom he/she often calls, the so-called "hot list." Traditional structured peer-to-peer networks for file sharing, despite of their support of unique item search, are not efficient for person search. This is mainly because they do not take into account human communication characteristics such as close social network, user-dependent hot list, and high skewness in access popularity. We show in this paper that person search can be much more efficient by taking into consideration of our communication features. Based on Pastry, our system makes use of hot lists in the routing process and clusters people of the same community together in the search graph, thereof creating a "small-world" effect. Simulation results show that our scheme achieves significantly lower search time than Pastry (by as much as 50%).